Couple's 300,000 honeybees keep farm buzzing

Monday

Aug 31, 2009 at 12:01 AMAug 31, 2009 at 8:21 AM

While some areas of the world have seen disastrous declines in honeybee populations, a small farm in central Illinois is a veritable bee haven. Linda Prescott, operations manager at Wildlife Prairie State Park, and her husband Pat manage their 34 acres near Norris in Fulton County with bees in mind. Nothing is done that might harm bees.

Clare Howard

While some areas of the world have seen disastrous declines in honeybee populations, a small farm in central Illinois is a veritable bee haven.

Linda Prescott, operations manager at Wildlife Prairie State Park, and her husband Pat manage their 34 acres near Norris in Fulton County with bees in mind. Nothing is done that might harm bees.

When it came to treating ash trees for emerald ash borer, the Prescotts opted not to because the treatment is potentially harmful to bees.

They have rolling fields of organic sunflowers and an expansive organic vegetable garden. The hives are tucked in a shaded timberline on the side of a bucolic meadow.

They bought their land with three barns on it five years ago in an auction from The Nature Conservancy. While land around their property was strip mined in the past, the Prescotts’ acreage was never mined because of thick bedrock. The original farmhouse burned in 1975, and the Prescotts have been converting one of the barns into a home.

Linda Prescott maintains five colonies with about 60,000 bees in each colony. This past spring, she found one box in one colony had mites, and the bees in that box didn’t make it through winter, but the rest of her colonies were healthy.

Her bees gather pollen on wildflowers, sunflowers, clover, fruit trees, buckwheat, goldenrod and basswood trees. Honeybees fly 55,000 miles and collect pollen from 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey.

“Know your local beekeeper,” Prescott said. “My bees go to all different types of flowers. Some beekeepers keep their bees in confinement and feed them sugar water. Ours are free ranging bees.”

Prescott usually harvests honey twice a year and leaves the last production for the bees to eat through winter. Whenever the bees are rained out and forced to stay in the hive, they eat honey.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Prescott suited up to harvest honey with Patti Jo Callahan, who works in landscape maintenance at Wildlife Prairie State Park and also is a part-time beekeeper.

With several puffs from the smoker used to quiet and subdue the bees, the two women began pulling drawers from the colonies to determine which ones they’d harvest. Each drawer weighs between 40 and 50 pounds.

“How are we doing ladies?” Prescott said in a calming voice as some bees became agitated while others continued to work, flying in to the hive with legs laden with pollen and leaving with legs bare.

“Sorry girls,” she said with another puff of the smoker. “Now don’t get upset ladies.”

Callahan said bees communicate the location of pollen with a bee waggle dance.

“The faster they waggle, the closer the honey. They can give precise directions,” Callahan said. “It’s just amazing how they communicate and how much work they do.”

The two women hope not to be stung, but know a beekeeper who wants to be stung. The venom of honeybee stings is reputedly good for inflammatory diseases, and he has arthritis, which seems to be helped by bee stings.

“Ouch!” Prescott said to an unexpected sting on her hip. She continued working, but said a pheromone is released with the sting that attracts other bees to the same spot to sting repeatedly.

The smoker calmed the situation.

After admiring the quantity her bees were producing, Prescott loaded drawers of honey into her truck and drove to a kitchen at Wildlife Prairie State Park where centrifuge equipment was used to separate the honey from the waxy honeycomb.

She and Callahan worked with a hot electric knife slicing off the outer wax and then spinning the comb to separate out the honey.

As comforting as the life and work of honeybees are, there is one discomforting practice.

The queen mates in the spring over a one-or two-day period and then never mates again. She stores the sperm and lays about 1,500 eggs a day. The fertilized eggs hatch into worker bees which are all female. The unfertilized eggs hatch into drones or male bees.

“The drones just live to fertilize the queen’s eggs. There could be 1,000 to 3,000 drones in a colony of 60,000 bees and one queen,” Prescott said. “The unneeded drones are thrown out of the hive and die. All the boys are kicked out. Thrown out the door. Then a guard stands at the door and won’t let them return. Only the girls are workers. If you don’t work, you get kicked out.”

Prescott, who speaks often to grade school children about the role of bees in the environment, said she’ll never again tell kindergartners about the fate of drones.

“I was talking to a kindergarten class in Farmington.” she said. “One little boy had the saddest look on his face. He was just so shocked, and he asked, ‘Aren’t the girls sad when they throw out all the boys?’ ”

Clare Howard can be reached at (309) 686-3250 or choward@pjstar.com.

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